Dead-Nettle

by John Buxton Hilton

  ‘Where exactly did you find them?’

  ‘In a coffer, under the gravel, at the far end of the stope, where the Old Man gave up.’

  ‘You did well, Mrs Belfield.’

  I got away from her at last and went over to Dead-Nettle with the sack over my shoulder like some barnstorming ham actor. Uppermost in my mind was that I could hardly put Florence Belfield in as evidence, that I would need something firmer than that to tie up a case against Gilbert Slack. I was thinking about him too much still. Had I not been paying so much attention to the poetic satisfaction of putting him away, it might have sunk in on me earlier that Florence Belfield had actually put me in possession of a vital thought that could lead me to the killer of Hetty Wilson. It was the second time, in fact, that this clue had been laid before me. But for the moment I did not see it. Negative evidence does sometimes blinker one.

  I went to see Frank Lomas and found him in the act of creating an even more austere tidiness about his home. He was in fact actually packing up his furniture and boxes, leaving out only the barest essentials of everyday life. I noticed that the things that had come over from the Fullers – the Grecian vase, the gilt picture-frames from which his family photographs had now been removed – had been neatly set apart on top of one of his chests. His mining tools were tied in a bundle.

  ‘Not thinking of leaving us, I hope?’

  ‘Not till you give me the word, Mr Brunt. But I’ll not stay an hour longer, once you’ve given me the right-away.’

  ‘And you’ve made up your mind what you’re going to do with yourself?’

  ‘Not yet, I haven’t. That’s something I’m putting off till the very last moment. I’m afraid, though, I know only too well what it’s going to be.’

  He tried to smile.

  ‘That’s hardly like you, Frank – not facing up to things as they are.’

  ‘I’ve done a lot of things in my time that are not like me, Mr Brunt.’

  ‘I suppose we all have, from time to time.’

  And then he started. I was with him four or five hours. I heard much that I already knew, and much that I didn’t: about coal-mines and infantry camps, about fear and high spirits in military action, even about the poetry – it was the only way to look at it, Mr Brunt – of improvised sanitation. About Hetty Wilson and Isobel Fuller. He told me things about both the women that sharpened my understanding of them – and of himself. He wasn’t a man, I thought, who would ever know what to make of women. His only hope was to find one he could trust. He used me as a sounding-board for his own simple ethics. Most of all, he wanted to look on himself as guiltless. I tried in vain to make him see that guilt, as he saw it, was of no great importance. He did not tell me anything that helped me to name the killer of Hetty Wilson.

  ‘But if I were you, Frank, I’d delay my departure until certain things –’

  ‘I’ve already told you, Mr Brunt: I’m not running away. You’ve no need to worry.’

  ‘I’m not worried, Frank. I’m certain you committed no crime here.’

  ‘Then there’s no point in my staying. There’s no lead in Dead-Nettle.’

  ‘I’m not talking about lead. Dead-Nettle’s shown you the way to something more abiding than a cartload of lead.’

  ‘If you’re talking about that stuff that Gilbert is supposed to have hidden away, Mr Brunt, you must know that I wouldn’t have touched it.’

  ‘That I do know – if for no other reason than that I have it all in this sack. You couldn’t keep a wife for a fortnight on what it’s worth.’

  ‘My wife’s dead, Mr Brunt.’

  ‘And I wasn’t thinking of her, either.’

  He saw then at last what I meant, but shook his head in determined gloom.

  ‘That’s all over, Mr Brunt. You’re talking about Isobel? It has to be all over. I couldn’t ask her –’

  He couldn’t even put it in words to me.

  ‘I think that the decision ought to be at least partially hers, Frank – ultimately. You’ll notice I said ultimately.’

  ‘What, me? A married man?’

  ‘You weren’t even that,’ I said. ‘You never were a married man. She wasn’t entitled to go through a form of marriage with you.’

  ‘All the same –’

  It did not sink in on him at once. He had rejected Hetty Wilson when he realised she was no more than a camp follower. When he met her in that Derby street, he saw her for nearly all she was. But even then he hadn’t known that she was a married woman. Even now I was not sure that he had grasped it. Eventually it might help, given his kind of conscience.

  ‘All the same,’ I said, in a completely different tone from his. And he thought about it, earnestly. I cannot really say that any positive hope appeared in his face – but I think his hopelessness was marginally relieved.

  I left him working it all out afresh. If I knew anything about Frank Lomas’s innate optimism, he would not give up without trying again.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Leitmotif – My sergeant and I were discussing the case in almost desultory fashion in a quiet corner of the Adventurers’Arms when ex-Company Quartermaster-Sergeant Wilson came in, and in the manner of most late afternoon arrivals in Margreave asked for a bed for the night.

  He came in and stood for three seconds just within the door, taking stock of the geography of furniture and clientele. It was almost as if he were given to systematic reconnaissance of all the commonplaces in his life. It had been the same, we learned, when he had arrived at Wirksworth railway station: he had stood in the doorway of the Booking Hall looking out across the grey street as if he had never seen a provincial English town before. In point of fact, we discovered, he had been in the army so long, if one includes civilian clerical duties at his Regimental Depot, that he had developed what almost amounted to a fear of any walk of life that diverged from his familiar patterns.

  They knew at once in the Adventurers’Arms who he was. There was something almost of a caricature of the discharged soldier in his appearance; the ramrod bearing, the scathing eye for the cut of a civilian’s moleskin trousers, the suppressed anger at the sloppiness of a world in which he hardly trusted himself to express an opinion. As P.C. Kewley had said of him, when he had been wandering the streets of Derby, usually at least half an hour’s march behind Hetty’s shadow, he looked, if not a retired soldier, at least like a confidence trickster posing as one.

  We had dug out various accounts of the way he had comported himself in Derby in the days before Lomas had come to collect his wife. The memories of people in the town had become relaxed and lubricated once the daily newspapers had started crying for the arrest of Frank Lomas.

  Wilson had stayed at the Bell Inn, had exchanged words with hardly anyone, but had looked penetratingly into the face of everyone he met: dark little eyes, stagnant with the suspicion engendered by his lack of intelligence, ready to believe that every man he met was in league with his cuckolders.

  He spent most of his time in a slow patrol of the streets, always on the outer edge of the pavement, halting at intervals to face outwards for minutes at a time, scanning the faces of people about their daily round, peering in at the windows of cabs. Yet he questioned no one: he seemed convinced that sooner or later he must find her for himself.

  And find her he did. It happened that he was watching the daily comings and goings of the town from the neighbourhood of the Post Office when he saw her come out from one of her vain visits to the Poste Restante. A mid-morning parcel-postman came between them with his red wicker handcart. He dodged bad-temperedly round it, but she had gained ten yards on him and a brewer’s dray, lumbering behind her, cut him off from her as she crossed the road. He was away after her as fast as he could: and then for the next few vital minutes was in the wake of the wrong woman.

  But at least the direction of Hetty’s flight had turned his thoughts in the direction of St Mary’s Gate. He caught sight of her again the next day, and she spotted him in time to turn sma
rtly to the right along a flagged passage between tenements. He was harder on her heels this time. She turned left into a complex of warehouse yards, began to run, her heels and ankles kicking outwards unathletically under her hitched-up skirts. He began to double, and would undoubtedly have caught her had he not slipped badly on the iron heel of what look suspiciously like a pair of boots from army stores. And meanwhile his progress was being watched with delight by pairs of eyes of which he was unaware: men at work amongst crates and boxes, a labourer realigning cobbles disrupted by the winter’s frosts. Wilson slithered round another right-angled corner to find the long, narrow alley deserted where a second previously he had seen her head bobbing over irregular spaces in the wall. He tried one after another of the nearest doors and gates, saw only waste spaces, discarded bits of machinery, a patchwork of arid allotments and a length of canal wharf.

  Wilson lost her for the remainder of that day, but kept watch as doggedly as did Duncan Mottershead. The next morning he saw her, or thought he saw her, coming out of Emma Rice’s. He called on Emma, was received by her on her monumental throne, the fat of her bosom heaving like a mouse-ridden harmonium. No, she had no guest at the moment answering to the description of Hetty. She did not convince him, and he tried to stand his ground. But all these young ladies, these days, Emma wheezed, they looked so alike, especially when glimpsed from behind, on the further pavement. The white skin of her brow furrowed as she tried to think which of her visitors he might have mistaken for her.

  Wilson by now was certain. Emma Rice’s involvement was transparent – and yet impenetrable. He knew of no tactics other than a frontal attack; but Emma Rice was frustratingly just not amenable to verbal assault. He was about to lose his temper – which could not have advanced his cause in any way – when someone came in at the front door: a girl in the better-found servant class, in the long skirts and floppy hat of the age.

  ‘Is that you, Jane?’

  Emma Rice called her up to her chair, not openly for Wilson’s inspection, but clearly with no other underlying intention. And it was true: at a distance, and from behind, he might have mistaken her for Hetty.

  ‘You got the currant loaf?’

  The girl answered and swung away. Emma Rice was a ruthless opportunist.

  ‘She’s the one you saw come out of the front door. About ten minutes ago, you said?’

  He thought he saw Hetty several times, later that morning, but every time a head was turned, he had the shock of discovering another unfamiliar face.

  Before Wilson showed up in Margreave, I had sent out requests to some of our colleagues in southern England to try to help us to piece together something of his background and of the circumstances of his marriage to Hetty. He had met her, a fetching and apparently ingenuous young thing, about a year before she stepped into the life of Frank Lomas, at a Sergeants’Mess Dance whilst his battalion was mustering for departure to India. Of Hetty herself little positive information came to light, beyond that she was a village girl, indeed from Hampshire, estranged from her parents for reasons which one can only – but all too easily – guess. And she was known to have arrived by train with other girls at other places where Her Majesty’s troops were formally gathered.

  The marriage with Wilson appears to have been completely out of character for both of them. Wilson was the last N. C.O. in his mess of whom romance was expected – a colourless, conservative, almost staid martinet of an infantry store-keeper. It is obvious that Hetty was an explosion in his life, but what she herself thought she had to gain from the match it is impossible to grasp. Some Quartermaster Sergeants, it is true, are excellent providers for others besides the troops in their care. She may even have wanted to impress, in some peculiar way and for some peculiar purpose, some of the women with whom she was doing the garrison rounds. Perhaps she was even looking ahead to a time when she might settle down. The last theory I can easily believe is that she was at any time genuinely in love with him; but even that, I suppose, is possible.

  At any rate, by the time Wilson’s discharge was imminent – that is to say, some years after Frank Lomas had been found, fooled, and already forgotten – she had cleared the decks of her interim commitments and entanglements. Wilson himself was taken on as a records-clerk in his own Regimental Depot, and they lived for a while in a rented cottage just beyond the perimeter of barrack life: the only life, it is clear, in which Wilson felt at ease. Our spies did not penetrate marital walls, and I have no way of knowing the inner secrets of the couple. They are not too difficult to imagine. Wilson was entirely inflexible – and so, in a totally different way, was Hetty. I think that she must also have pressed domestic ambitions on him. He had a day in London to face an Interview Board of the Corps of Commissionaires; perhaps he had already seen the desirability of taking Hetty away from even the sight of a barracks. When he returned home that evening, it was to find the cottage cold and deserted.

  Wilson stood now at the bar of the Adventurers’Arms, his eyes scanning each of the drinkers in turn. And they were struck silent. They had had some recent practice in the reception of remote strangers but this one, they knew with one accord, was likely to prove a key figure. And the dramatic fact was not lost on them that Sergeant Clayton and I were surveying it all from our shadowy corner.

  ‘Is there a man here who goes by the name of Gil?’

  Nobody answered him, but two or three pairs of eyes looked over towards my sergeant and me, expecting some signal reaction. Wilson mistook their meaning and came over to us with stumpy, aggressive steps. He addressed himself to me.

  ‘You are this Gil, are you?’

  And he looked scornfully at Sergeant Clayton.

  ‘And you, I supose, are Harry Burgess?’

  I pulled out a chair for him and opened my wallet to show him my identity.

  ‘I’m sorry, Inspector.’

  He sank wearily beside us. Ex-CQMS Tug Wilson had drawn abreast with events at last: almost. All he knew, he had gathered from the newspapers. He assumed that Frank Lomas was the guilty man.

  ‘And to tell you the truth, Inspector, I don’t know whether to bash his own head in for him, or to shake him by the hand.’

  ‘I’d do my best to forget about him altogether, if I were you,’ I said. He told us about the cold, deserted cottage – and about the charred letter, in the empty grate, of which he had been able to salvage little more than two words: Derby and Gil. That was what had got Wilson as far as an audience with Emma Rice.

  Could Wilson, masquerading his slow thought and belated arrivals, have been leading a second existence? I tried to project him into the role of murderer. I have always found this a valuable theoretical exercise – at any rate, often a sobering one – when an investigation has been stuck at a certain stage.

  Could Wilson’s private enquiries possibly have led him, earlier and in secret, to Margreave and Dead-Nettle? Could he have been here on Sunday night? Have been here and gone again? If he had ridden into the village, under cover of darkness, he could easily have steered clear of witnesses. And now he came here with this aspect of bumbling dignity, verging on the slow-witted. Couldn’t it all be the perfect cover for him?

  If he had ridden –

  Good God – wasn’t that the key to the whole story? Twice in her statements – once in this pub, when she had come here hysterical from her find in Dead-Nettle, and later to me, when I talked to her in Badger’s Swallet, Florence Belfield had been certain that the intruder had ridden away from the mine on horse-back.

  So it couldn’t have been Frank Lomas, could it, because he hadn’t a horse, and twice to my knowledge had had to hire one. It couldn’t be Slack, because he had been on foot that evening, his main purpose having been to meet Lomas from Chapel and take him off somewhere. Likewise Isobel Fuller.

  On my left-hand side, Sergeant Clayton was too well trained to stir a limb or meet my eyes. But I knew what he would be thinking. I now had enough information to make medicine with Gilbert Slack. It was Sergeant Cla
yton who had unearthed the bib-and-brace salesman, the one who had overheard the talk between Gilbert and Hetty. It was not lost on Clayton that I had been a good deal more anxious than any cool and objective Detective-Inspector ought to be to lay some positive charge against Slack – even if it were such a humdrum standby as obstructing us in the performance of our duties. With Wilson’s evidence about the burnt letter in the grate, I was now in a position to mix Slack a fair old bottle. If I had anything to gain from it.

  And one thought led fortuitously to another, wiping away an obstacle that had been troubling me all along. Why had Slack made Hetty wait in Derby? Why had he not let her come and take Lomas by storm here in Margreave?

  Surely because Slack, thick-skinned and insensitive, unable to believe that his own charms could be resisted for long, must have had his eye on the day when, with Frank out of the way, he could turn his attentions to Isobel. And if Lomas had actually been away to fetch Hetty, how much more acrimoniously Isobel would have hated him.

  That, I thought, fitted in very neatly with Slack’s understanding of people.

  The door of the inn opened again and Fordyce came in, my Detective-Constable, who had spent all his time on the case keeping a quiet eye on the movements of Frank Lomas.

  ‘I think you ought to know, sir – Lomas has gone over to the Hall.’

  That was the moment I had really been waiting for.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  He rode away on horse-back –

  The thought was gnawing continuously into my mind. I could be wrong about it, hopelessly and foolishly wrong. I am not claiming that it was the vital piece of evidence on which the case broke. But it was the vital point on which my thoughts turned. Yet I knew that I could be carpeted with ridicule for paying more than a fleeting heed to anything from Florence Belfield’s lips.

  But there were other things as well, other lines of thought to which my mind kept turning. Had I not myself been present at that strange moment that seemed, in retrospect, like the beginnings of Isobel’s illness, while I had been examining the laundry for give-away stains?